Gender, Garveyism, and the Racial Geographies of Belonging in Costa Rica

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In this Race and Difference Colloquium presentation (Sept. 19, 2016), Asia Leeds, Spelman College, examines the impact of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Garveyism on the politics of black citizenship in Costa Rica. She looks specifically at the local adaptations and applications of Garveyism by the English-speaking Afro-Caribbean community on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast as they moved from stateless residents to formal citizens in the early to mid-twentieth century. Leeds’s research reveals that West Indian residents utilized Garveyism to simultaneously claim fitness for Costa Rican citizenship and to form alternative, diasporic spaces of belonging, which situated them at the interstices of nation and diaspora. Interrogating community anxieties around black women’s sexuality and the gender roles implicit in both the Costa Rican branches of the UNIA and the larger transnational organization, her research reveals the links between Garveyite ideas of citizenship, redemption and the gendered politics of respectability. Since branches of the UNIA remain active, she will show how the legacies of Garveyism shape black belonging and Pan-Africanism in contemporary Costa Rica.

The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference supports research, teaching, and public dialogue that examine race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality.